Data: Labour Safe Seats Are The Worst Places To Live

It’s nicer where the Tories are. A well known phrase in the fiercely tribal world of British politics, but is there any verity to it? I looked at the five safest Tory and the five safest Labour seats, and compared three quantifiable indicators of quality of life; income, education, and the need for state support.

I had planned to break down crime rates, but most of this data tends to be divided by Police Area rather than constituency. However it is worth quoting a report from Parliament which noted “Crime and anti-social behaviour rates are highest in Labour, lower in Liberal Democrat and lowest in Conservative constituencies and this is true for each category of offence/anti-social behaviour. Labour MPs are more likely to represent constituencies with higher proportions of residents in receipt of out of work benefits.” Link to full report here.

Remember the quotation ‘you can take the man out of the bog but you can’t take the bog out of the man’. Just walk round (if you dare) any labour constituency and get a flavour of the inhabitants and their environment, scary to say the least. No amount of money thrown at the local education system in these places will make any difference and as long as the chosen career path is the same as Mum and Dad, and that is to stay on benefits there will never be any change.

Tom Maslen

Maybe its because Labour leaders don’t look and sound like toffed up preppy silver spoon in mouths upper class twats, and that they can relate to people who don’t blame them for being shitted on by the establishment. Poor people, eh? What are they thinking of?!

all those working class MPs on the labour front bench will surely change something when they get into government, after all they all have personal experience of manual jobs, getting up at five in the morning waiting for a bus or train to take you to work, getting home when its dark and doing that all on your own money, no expense account, i for one look forward to those hard working brothers and sisters from the workers party changing things

forgotten_man

I’m
trying to gauge whether you are being er.. a tad facetious here..

If so
, good one, if you are serious then…Bad News…

I know of an up and coming politician that will be , I’m pretty certain, a Labour councilor soon in a very high profile Labour constituency. the person in question is very intelligent, very well (privately but via scholarship educated), in a top university , I believe that is at least partly on scholarship. So we are talking serious ability here.
Actually very nice family as well…ticks all of the right boxes….

But.

Seems to think that private enterprise is the Seed of Satan and hasn’t yet worked out that most Labour areas are that way because of the general attitude of the population in those areas.

i.e. ,
the exact opposite attitude this individual has displayed to achieve what they have!

Before the trolls start ranting on about privileged upbringing etc…I have been on the dole for an extended period of time in a “Labour” area so have
first hand experience of “Benefits Street” (pretty much spot on by the way.) .

So we have a very intelligent and able individual who is carving a nice political career out of deciding what you and I are going to do for his “poor people”.

Which compared with , say , using their considerable ability to finding the Higgs’s best friend or the cure for all cancers, seems a criminal waste of talent.
So dont hold your breath!

keith

the only thing i was being serious and facetious about is the lack of working class representation in the labour ranks, they really don’t understand that we are not happy living in sub standard housing, seeing our wages depressed to the benefit of multi national businesses ( how many of them spent time chatting over dinner at Number10 with tony and gorden) because of labours open door immigration policy, cheap labour to keep us in our place and the brothers and sisters in our great trade unions ( sorry if that’s a contradiction) went along with it, they have no understanding that we want to get on in life, become richer, improve our children’s chances in this world, we are governed by an elite, who talk the talk but can never walk the walk and listening to brother Ed it seems nothing has changed

forgotten_man

The paradox is that it is “the toffs” that can out perform the “Labour Man” when it comes to changing things for the common good.

I get a lot of grief for saying this but I was an unskilled “1 in 10” in the early 80s and was able to turn things around to being better paid than most MPs 12 years later….under a Tory government!

I then plunged into sub benefits level of living during the “New Labour” years!

The individual i mentioned isnt “to the Manor Born” by any stretch but is already being paid to write speeches for at least one high profile Labour leach and is learning how to suckle from the government teat without actually ever having to do any “…personal experience of manual jobs, getting up at five in the morning waiting for a bus or train to take you to work,…” or run a household etc.

And , as latently clever as they are, wouldn’t stand up for 60 seconds to some actual hard questioning on the realities of getting by in a real life.

I’m actually considering placing a bet that they will be an MP sometime in the latter half of this decade, though unlikely at the next election.

But that is an idea of who will be representing “The Working Class” for the next 30 years….I think I prefer a Tory, no real pretence but a position you can negotiate with.

keith

i have walked both sides of the track, worked hard for others started my own business did well but lost it all when some big customers went bust owing me lots of money, had to sell my house to make sure all my staff were paid and i left no one i owed not paid, since then have found it hard to get things together but you have to keep trying, that’s what’s wrong with most politicians nowadays, there lack of experience in the real world of hard knocks

forgotten_man

I have avoided Big Business clients so far but have been burnt by a council and , believe it or not, the prison service! I do know someone who’s business was pulled from under them by one of the large power companies, poached his staff, disregarded lockout agreements and lied to perspective new clients. Since this started during previous governments reign I’m not so sure it is particularly party political though.

Cant think of any Labour or Tories that have run businesses, though some of the latter have dodged real bullets in real wars but there is one genuine rags to riches story in the Lib Dems though…though I have never understood why someone who has made a successful private career balancing the books chooses a party that doesn’t really want to do the same..

In politics the best you will ever get is to deal with the devil you know…and nobody really knows what the left actually stand for.

John

While I doubt that there isn’t a link, I agree with Jeff Evans; this is merely a correlation and does not equal causation.

Jeff Evans

Lee Jenkins: your analysis confuses cause and effect. Rich people live in nicer areas, have children who benefit from the education system, don’t need to claim benefits, and also vote conservative.

So what’s new? Also W G Grace is dead, and Mafeking has been relieved.

why would Labour make any effort in these constituencies while in power – they are guaranteed their vote that is why the swing seats seem to get most of Labours largesse – seriously why are parts of Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Sunderland etc still a sh!thole, it makes no sense to ‘waste’ money there as the Labour vote is taken for granted

stewart

But these areas have the most entrenched left wing institutions , local councils trade unions etc. well practised in extracting their share from a labour governments on the many occasions they have been in power.

RockliffeRover

Take Middlesbrough as an example. Now the place worst hit by the cuts, because it was the town most dependent on central government funding when Labour were in power. During 13 years of Labour government, they spent a fortune in Middlesbrough creating unsustainable public sector jobs to cover up their dogmatic decision to shun private sector investment. As soon as Labour leaves office, public sector cuts = mass unemployment in a Labour seat once again, leaving the way open for the Labour propaganda machine to claim that we are the poorest town in the country yet the Tories are cutting us the hardest. Same old same old. Like another poster said, 90 years of poor people voting Labour and they’re still poor. Well, all except for those that have climbed aboard the party bandwagon and now make a good living keeping good people down in the guise of democracy.

It is a chicken and egg issue. Are they socialist constituencies because they are poor or are they poor because they are full of socialists?

stewart

That’s a fair point. But after decades of uninterrupted implementation of ‘socialist’ policy’s ,even in the area you would most expect improvement, eduction there has been none.

MrVeryAngry

Thanks. Saved me posting that.

Sue Posi-Tory

How many Labour MP live in their constituencies, as opposed to having taxpayer paid for second homes there? There are certainly not many Labour held seats where I would like to live so why should they?

RockliffeRover

Our previous Labour MP, Sir Stuart Bell, spent much of his time in France. He didn’t ‘do’ surgeries, after he was ‘attacked’ by a member of the public at one. Watch the Walsh Bros film ‘ToryBoy the Movie’, a real eye-opener into how Labour operate in these northern ‘safe seats’.

I think that’s the quote you’re looking for. Why are some blogs so afraid of citations?

steevee

….but given these are safe seats, neither party concentrates their political message on their residents or activities on their area. Lots of the safest seats barely see any door-knocking, and labour’s position on the bedroom tax is aimed more at the guardian readers who don’t like it rather than shoring up the support of the people it actually affects. Labour’s strategy is currently to attack 100 swing seats, the Tories are defending 40 of theirs – a more meaningful exercise might be looking at what those seats are like to live in.

Dan Tubb

It is crucial for Labour to keep people dependant on welfare and poorly educated. Any failure to do so would result in a collapse of their vote.

channel.fog

One question – why doesn’t the free market ensure that all these constituencies are equally wealthy and comfortable? Why is the wealth so unevenly spread? Could it be that your point is arse about face? People (stupidly, but understandably) vote Labour because… though fat lot of good it does them.

stewart

One answer – these constituencies are those that oppose and inhibit the free market most

channel.fog

But how can ‘a constituency’ inhibit the free market? The free market must be a very weak and fragile force of nature if a few thousand people can bring it to a halt.

stewart

A few thousand council apparatchiks ,rent a mob political activists and single issue grievance mongers can do untold damage .

Just look what they’ve done to the country

RockliffeRover

Our local council, Middlesbrough Borough, is ‘Labour-led’. We have an ‘Executive councillor for Regeneration and Development, Charles Rooney, who has been pictured twice in the last six months, along with other Labour councillors and even our Labour-sponsored Police and Crime Commissioner Barry Coppinger, marching through the streets of Middlesbrough waving the banners of two different unions, the FBU and Unite. What message does that send about our town and the attitude towards private enterprise of our council, to potential private investors? Who would invest in such a place when there are many more areas where conditions are more conducive to nurturing private enterprise?

Lord Lupin

And look at the country whenever we have a Labour government! Enough said!

Vote YES in Sept ’14

I bet Labour MPs would say that this is just the way they like it. Would not surprise me given the fact Jim (the pies) Hood MP stood in Westminster (6th Feb 2014) and said even if Scots were better of as an independent nation that he would still vote against it. The two party system in Westminster relies on the class system to keep their voters entrenched and the inequality perpetual. There is a better way, end inequality and end Labour, go for a political system based on equality for all and a drive and focus on sustainable policies.